A rarely challenged tenet of economic theory is that as long as consumers do not face liquidity constraints, goods satisfying different fundamental needs not should exhibit significant cross-price elasticities. Mental accounting, however, provides a theoretical mechanism by which this assumption may be violated when the posted prices of goods unexpectedly depart from historical or expected leve...

I show that the cross-sectional standard deviation of individual price changes in the BLS CPI database is countercyclical and comoves strongly with the frequency of price adjustments. Standard Ss models with only …rst moment shocks cannot explain these facts. Adding a second moment (‘uncertainty’) shock improves the model …t signi…cantly. Furthermore, it implies a strongly procyclical sensitivi...

We examine incentives of bottleneck facility holders to manipulate access charge accounting in free entry downstream markets. We consider the situation wherein one firm holds an upstream bottleneck facility and new entrants use it at the regulated price (access fee) to provide final products. The bottleneck facility holder affects the regulated input price. We investigate how vertical separatio...

We study effects of direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) in a market with two pharmaceutical firms providing horizontally differentiated (branded) drugs. Patients varying in their susceptability to medication are a priori uninformed of available medication. Physicians making the prescription choice perfectly identify a patient’s most suitable drug. Firms promote drugs to physicians (detailing)...

This paper develops a rational expectations model with multiple equilibrium unemployment rates where the price of capital may be unbounded above. I argue that this property is an important feature of any rational-agent explanation of a financial crisis, since for the expansion phase of the crisis to be rational, investors must credibly believe that asset prices could keep increasing forever wit...

The coordinated cellular responses to physiological stress are known to be effected in part by the activation of heat-shock factor 1, a transcriptional activator protein capable of binding to, and inducing transcription from genes containing heat shock elements. Other stress responsive signal transduction pathways also exist including the stress activated protein kinase cascade that regulates t...

Although a lot of the empirical research have studied the relationship between changes of oil price and economic activity, it is surprising that little research has been conducted on the relationship between oil price shocks and the Greater China region (China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan). Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to apply a detail monthly data from 1997/7 to 2008/9 to fill up this ...

This paper analyzes the macroeconomic impact of structural oil shocks in four of the top oil-consuming Asian economies, using a VAR model. We identify three different structural oil shocks via sign restrictions: an oil supply shock, an oil demand shock driven by global economic activity and an oil-specific demand shock. The main results suggest that economic activity and prices respond very dif...